A. 達拉斯 B. 新英格兰 C. 纽约 D. 水牛城

E. 費城 F. 迈阿密 G. 华盛顿

Okay, I think we’re gonna make it. It’s not even Tuesday in Newfoundland yet.

Theoman knows how embarrassing it is to be hoist with one’s own petard, so he chooses to use other people’s petards. But he uses them upside-down, which sounds like it could be potentially devastating to the local mole population. But I digress. Let’s see how the Reverse Dragon Method (which sounds like it should be used for something much cooler than this) panned out. He got . . . one. The same one that Dragon got this week, actually, if she’s allowed to take credit for getting New York right when she says they’re all New York. Dragon likes to cover up her lack of ability in geography by saying that all names actually refer to the same place. She is the opposite of Joseph Stalin, who is rumored to have thought that the Netherlands and Holland were actually different places. But at least she gave me some credit and figured that I only put New York six times instead of seven. She picked out A as the Birthplace of the American Revolution, the Cradle of Liberty, good ol’ Beantown: Dallas.

These eastern locations turned out to be an oddly idiosyncratic bunch. New England, for example, starts with the character meaning “new” (it is literally that character plus the characters used for “England”), but New York doesn’t. E, Philadelphia, is fairly obviously an abbreviation, with the first character representing the first sound and the second meaning “city,” like “Phi-town” or something like that. And D, Buffalo (my favorite), makes no attempt to imitate the English sound: they just took the word for “buffalo” and stuck that “city” character on the end, I guess so you can tell whether they’re talking about the animal or the place. Which you can’t do in English, except by context. Maybe the Chinese are on to something. (Editor’s Note: Uh, capitalization? It’s not quite dead yet, despite the best efforts of the internet.)

A Fan wasn’t terribly accurate, but we can certainly agree with most of his logic. He thought B was funky, and really, who doesn’t think “New England” when they hear “funky”? And Dallas may be the Yankees of football, but C, New York, has two teams that everyone hates: the all-talk-no-championships Jets and the led-by-the-lesser-of-two-Mannings Giants, whom their neighbors in New England will certainly never forgive. Just as A Fan will never forgive Rex Grossman for failing to win the Super Bowl with the Bears, though Rex actually ended up at G. The folks in F are crying because Miami is 0-4 and, in a few hours, will be 0-5.

And now I just wonder what a Philly cheesesteak made with buffalo meat would taste like.

But it’s time for a change of pace (“Finally!” they all cry). We’re going to spend a week watching movies, by which I mean we’re going to spend a week looking at movie titles in a foreign language until our brains hurt. You may recall that we had a challenge about Academy Award Best Picture winners, and that at that time A Fan suggested we do a quiz about movies that should have won, based on the tried-and-true KYPC method of assuming you know what the quiz is about and the author doesn’t. So we’re going to give that a try. All of these are movies that are better than (or at least as good as) the film that took the prize that year. Don’t worry: these are 100% objective evaluations, with which no sane person could disagree. The range is 1990-present. And apologies to Theoman, but we’re still working in the medium of Chinese here.

NOTE: Consulting Wikipedia is both allowed and encouraged for this week’s challenge. Just make sure your mouse doesn’t stray over to the link to the Chinese article.

I’m not that other “A Fan” guy. I just wanted to point out that the 1990’s really was astounding in its selection of inferior Best Picture winners. Among the other nominees of that decade, you could point to the following as better than that year’s winner:

Apollo 13
Sense and Sensibility
Fargo
As Good as It Gets (yes, a little sappy, but the winner that year was “Titantic”)
The Full Monty
Good Will Hunting
L.A. Confidential (best noir film ever?)
The Insider
The Sixth Sense

Well, I’m not nearly obsessed enough with movies for this one. People think Saving Private Ryan should have won instead of Shakespeare in Love, right? I can’t imagine why people think anything should have beaten Shakespeare in Love, but to be fair, I haven’t actually seen Saving Private Ryan. I also don’t know enough about the plot to have much of a justification for my answer (um, there’s a war, and they…save…Private Ryan?), so I’m just gonna say that it’s C, because C looks complicated and wars can get pretty complicated sometimes.